NASA to Hunt Black Holes with New Space Telescope

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After months of delay, NASA's newest space telescope is just two
weeks away from launching on an ambitious mission to seek out the
universe's black holes and investigate their mysterious origins.

The space agency's
Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is slated to
launch June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The
X-ray space telescope will ride into orbit on a Pegasus XL rocket
from Orbital Sciences, which is designed to launch in midair from
a rocket-carrying aircraft. The mission has been awaiting launch
since March, when NASA delayed its liftoff pending a review of
the rocket.

NuSTAR will study
how black holes form and grow, and how these processes affect
their host galaxies, said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator
of the NuSTAR mission at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif.

"It's the very first telescope to focus high-energy X-rays,"
Harrison told reporters today (May 30) in a news briefing. "This
will enable NuSTAR to study some of the hottest, densest and most
energetic phenomena in the universe, for example black
holes and explosions of massive stars."

NuSTAR will examine these objects with unprecedented sensitivity
by studying light in the high-energy, short-wavelength X-ray
range. Images beamed back from NuSTAR will be 10 times sharper
than current X-ray observatories in orbit, Harrison said.

"It's opening up a new window on the universe," said Paul Hertz,
director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in
Washington, D.C. "Although we are going into this mission with
many scientific questions, like all of our NASA missions, we're
going to find unexpected things out there that will lead us to
questions and answers that we aren't even anticipating at this
time." [ Gallery:
NASA's Black Hole Hunting Space Telescope ]

NuSTAR was originally scheduled to launch in March, but was
delayed after NASA decided more time was needed to review
software on the Pegasus XL rocket.

The delay meant that the mission, which carried an initial price
tag of about $165 million, increased by several million dollars,
or a few percent, Hertz said. NuSTAR's science missions, however,
were not impacted by the extra time required for the rocket's
software review.

NuSTAR will examine the innermost regions of black holes, where
hot material is accelerated close to the speed of light, boosting
emissions into the high-energy X-ray range, Harrison explained.

In these areas, light is bent and severely distorted by the black
hole's strong gravity. By studying atoms in the X-ray band as
they are drawn into the black hole, researchers will be able to
see the effects of a black hole's intense gravity.

These observations will let scientists watch as a black hole
feeds and grows, and will offer them a glimpse of the environment
surrounding these cosmic giants, said Daniel Stern, NuSTAR
project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif.

But NuSTAR is also designed to study other intriguing phenomena
in our galaxy and the universe, Stern added, including the
remnants of massive stars that end their lives in
violent supernova explosions, high-speed particle jets,
ultra-dense neutron stars, and coronal mass ejections and flares
from the sun.

The NuSTAR telescope falls under NASA's Small Explorer mission
category, and is led by Caltech and managed by the agency's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Denise Chow on
Twitter@denisechow.
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